Model deprecation

How it works

Deprecation is the process of retiring a model: the provider announces it, usually names a replacement, and sets a retirement date after which calls to that model ID return errors. Between announcement and retirement the model normally keeps working.

Notice periods and policies differ by provider, and cloud platforms may set their own dates. Many providers publish a deprecations page listing dates. Open-weights models you host yourself are not retired by anyone, though hosts may stop serving them.

Track the deprecation pages of every provider you use and keep an evaluation set ready, so a migration is a test run plus a config change. The replacement may differ in price, tokenizer, defaults and supported parameters.

Worked example

Illustrative: a provider announces on 1 March that a model retires on 1 September. A team with a ready evaluation suite spends a week comparing the replacement; a team without one finds out on 1 September when production requests start failing.

Common mistakes

• 1Not following provider deprecation notices or checking the deprecations page.
• 2Assuming the replacement accepts the same parameters and produces the same output format.
• 3Forgetting that cloud platforms may retire a model on different dates from the maker.